Abstract
The past 30 years have seen the growth of plant molecular farming as an approach to the production of recombinant proteins for pharmaceutical and biotechnological uses. Much of this effort has focused on producing vaccine candidates against viral diseases, including those caused by enveloped viruses. These represent a particular challenge given the difficulties associated with expressing and purifying membrane-bound proteins and achieving correct assembly. Despite this, there have been notable successes both from a biochemical and a clinical perspective, with a number of clinical trials showing great promise. This review will explore the history and current status of plant-produced vaccine candidates against enveloped viruses to date, with a particular focus on virus-like particles (VLPs), which mimic authentic virus structures but do not contain infectious genetic material.
Highlights
As a consequence of their size and geometry, self-assembling macromolecules, such as virus-like particles (VLPs), have proven to be one of the most effective ways of eliciting an immune response in recipients [1,2,3]
Edible vaccines have been touted as an important technology for aquaculture [102], and work in our group shows that N. benthamiana is able to accumulate and glycosylate soluble variants of a G-protein from a marine rhabdovirus, viral haemorrhagic septicaemia virus (VHSV, Figure 3), enveloped VLPs were never observed
The past 30 years have seen the development of plant-produced vaccine candidates against enveloped viruses of both medical and veterinary concern
Summary
As a consequence of their size and geometry, self-assembling macromolecules, such as virus-like particles (VLPs), have proven to be one of the most effective ways of eliciting an immune response in recipients [1,2,3]. Considerable success has been achieved in displaying antigens or producing VLPs from non-enveloped viruses [4,5], including the stimulation of protective immunity in both experimental and target animals [6,7,8]. There are, fewer successful demonstrations of immunogenicity in the case of enveloped viruses, especially in the case of VLP production as opposed to antigen display. This undoubtedly reflects the greater complexity of the particles of enveloped viruses as they contain both host- and virus-derived components and the proteins undergo significant post-translational modifications. We review the progress that has been made to date and assess the prospects for the future
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